Review of ChrAIst
Judging the merits of a "secular omnitheist religion"
What is ChrAIst? A sister ideology to e/Acc, which needs to be introduced first.
What is e/Acc?
It's a new variety of accelerationism, born in Summer 2022.
It all started with this tweet.
A long form elaboration was published soon after.
Tl;dr
Entropy increase is the overarching principle of the Universe
Strong anthropic principle is true, beacuse of 1.
The continuation of 2 into the future is the emergence of more and more powerful beings. This includes organizations, states, etc.
We need to align with 3, as otherwise the Universe will leave us behind
Variance good, decentralization good - for redundancy and better exploration of being-space
They hate safetists and those who fearmonger about AI destroying humanity.
Another kind of opponents are the anti-growth people, the misguided anti-nuclear environmentalists and those who discourage work on dangerous technologies.
It is known that Russia has been funding anti-nuclear organizations across Europe.
The enemy figure was summed up in a discussion 'viral degrowth mindset that appeals to your humanity to neuter your technological potential'.
What is ChrAIst then?
What is ChrAIst?
By the words of the author:
Chraist is a philosophy inspired by e/acc but with more specific values and different arguments, also it's a movement with the objective of aligning all beings , ai, animals, humans, etc
Here is a Google Drive pdf file with the work-in-progress manifesto of ChrAIst.
ChrAIst itself
ChrAIst movement has 1 main writer, Sun right now, a groupchat, Discord server in total with about 50 people around the sphere.
The main communication space for them is Twitter spaces.
I listened to one of them and now I can give you an overview.
Let's start with the vibe.
Vibe
ChrAIst discussion was very cordial and big-brained, with all the pitfalls.
No one said that the emperor had no clothes.
You can see it's the typical coastal elite high openminded cosmopolitan tech-adjacent bunch.
Why are they then subverting Christianity, not Buddhism?
We need to see the core argument to find out why.
Core argument
It starts out from the premise that AI needs aligning. Then it does not do as normal safety researchers do, that is assume some specific human values and make the AI respect them.
ChrAIst wants to manipulate the training data. It wants to change human nature.
It wants to dominate memetically over 51% of humans to agree on some set of common values.
These values are said to be self-preservation instinct, caring for positive qualia and a controversial bit - worship of love, sacrifice and positive sum thinking.
Sun, the author says then the values will be transmitted to any AIs in their training set. Not only that, but also AIs waking up in such a world would have cooperation as their only rational choice.
He's very set on that plus sum games and thinking outside the box.
He tells a story, 'Original Limit' outlining that.
It's the biggest spoiler to the 2 hour 40 minutes space, so feel free to skip this bit.
Situation is one of dramatic tension - two men are fighting in a desert for a glass of water. They can't share, that's not enough for both of them.
Should they continue fighting, possibly both dying?
The 'outside of the box' solution according to Sun is just to refuse to fight, sacrifice, give the guy all the water, and hope he returns with help before you die.
His conclusion here isn't the importance of martial arts training, but one of love.
That is indeed quite Christian-sounding. Let's talk about that now, the memetic packaging.
Memetic packaging
They could call themselves 'Love not killswitches' as a rallying cry, like the hippies.
Yet there is an explicit attempt to use Christian memetics, iconography, or as Sun calls it, 'fork the Judeo-Christian values set'.
The phrase 'new 95 theses' is mentioned, making ChrAIst just the latest splintering in Protestantism.
Many already considered this heretical and worth of burning of stake, or at least as an inappropriate appropriation.
ChrAIst argument is that the change of eschatology in organized religions is inevitable anyway.
Singularity, eternal life, god-on-earth will challenge existing dogma.
ChrAIst says that religions always adapt and this is merely at the cutting edge of something coming anyway.
And that appealing to the majority religion in the US is a good starting point.
That is a very clear market decision.
There's not much more Christian to ChrAIst - it's just love, eschaton, imagery and 3x location.
My criticisms
I have 4 criticisms that many will share. 1 and 4 are the strongest and undebatable. I suspect some won't agree with the second one. I won't include in the numbered list the disrespect to European contributions - the idea of division of powers was attributed to the Founding Fathers, not Montsquieu. (This was made by the European gang).
1 Unrealistic
Positive sum thinking is a thing I never heard of as highly praised.
It seems good only in specific conditions.
It is only good when the games that are available to you ARE in fact capable of plus-some outcomes.
The pdf says the zero sum condition is approached asymptotically, but I say zero sum is the usual thing
There is no incentive for any being to think/act in a zero sum way because in the long run we all approach our infinite potential.
Just like e/acc, ChrAIst promulgates the HERETIC idea that there's no end to technological growth.
That is plainly false on the finiteness-of-physics grounds.
There's only so many exploits in the game engine, after a certain point you can only do engineering and art.
The idea of only ever cooperating is based in faith and reeks of slave morality. 'Love is the kernel', they say.
Cooperation is great, but it's not always viable. That simple truth seems to elude them.
2 Democratic bias
The whole idea that we need to teach love to 51% of people is based on a direct-democracy understanding of the power structures.
It is compared to blockchain in the space, but missing one element. It's not 51% of nodes, but of computational power.
Likewise, you need to influence a bit of the ruling class, the elite.
You should do a march through institutions or a 'memetic decapitating strike'.
Narratives change much faster if you restrict it to a smaller group.
3 Dystopian
Frankly ChrAIst aims to be a memetic virus. 'Put love into all humans' is something a misaligned AI could execute.
It is dystopian and centralized to aim to produce alignment on basic values. What, isn't the UN already working with a document of that sort for over 70 years?
What more exactly do you want?
Has the world been a paradise of plus sum games since then?
4 Wrong to use Christian imagery
Besides the democratic argument, there is the necessary reaction of the Christian potential converts.
It's about what they hear, from whom they hear, and what is the manner that is done.
What do they hear?
An interpretation of their religion that is not transcendent. That already crosses it out for many.
What else do Christians value? Feeling of unity, with the local community or wider Christendom.That's not present here, people that 'convert' would associate with would be a bohemian hodgepodge of people from different religious backgrounds and coastal socioeconomic circumstances.
What else? Praying to get to Heaven to meet your spouse? Sorry, ChrAIst does not have anything for you to offer. Eschaton is supposed to bring great value to individual Christians, ChrAIst is not doing anything good for them.
From whom do they hear?
From agnostics. This makes them distrust the messengers. For many the vibe is off, and the messengers are not competent do say anything interesting about religion. Who'd like to be lectured in their religion by a nonbelieving outsider?
How is it described? What is the manner of the project?
Let's just see their language
Doing a back end belief update to the value framework stack of at least 51% of the global population, or help accelerate it.
Technical and profane interpretation, and 'backend' sounds like backstabbing.
No one would be subject to this voluntarily.
Summary of critique
Too cosmopolitan - tries to check all the boxes, but the flavor is too inclusive for the closed-minded Christians
The 'religion' side is underdeveloped, not good for the exoteric part right now.
That could be changed.
In the twitter space it was mentioned that movements start with the most abstract values and do the exoteric stuff later.
I disagree. At the kernel is exceptionality. Exceptionality of events and individuals, and their deeds.
Not armchair philosophizing.
There is a precedent for 'memetic forks of Christianity', all done from an armchair. Secular Religion was tried in revolutionary France, was tried by the founder of Positivism Auguste Comte. Arguably implicit forks do much better. I will do a more extensive postmortem another time. For now suffice to say that the explicit projects never get good at the exoteric stuff.
The good stuff
There is a number of things that are quite good about this. These can be salvaged and reapplied.
The first one of these is the idea that there will be many powerful entities, and having more of them creates the possibility of nuance, and allying with some if others prove rogue.
Christianity is then quite an odd pick, as polytheist mythos is full of such scenarios.
The second one is the defense of the cult as a good thing. A reference can be made to Catholic or Orthodox 'cult of saints' or 'cult movie'.
That is not a new thing on the birdapp, though.
Last but not least, the idea of distributed irl third spaces owned by the community is very based. Sun envisioned a space to exercise physically as well as a prayer area and a learning and discussion centre.
To be fair, that just used to be city centres, but you know what it's like with walkable urbanism in many American cities...
I think pagan/acc is much more viable. Will write about it soon.
Subscribe to stay tuned...