In the Limit, Only Culture Remains

This essay is about this post of mine from X dot com the everything app:

to the extent that science is just discovering the nature of reality

in the limit all knowledge maxxing species will converge to the same set of scientific discoveries

which means in that limit the only truly non-replaceable meaningful thing you can do is contribute to culture

— iulio (@thelokasiffers) November 10, 2024

Let me build my thesis step by step, in case the 240-character limit of X dot com made it unclear:

1. First, I make a simplifying definition: “Science” is the process of describing reality, where describing means finding models that reliably explain and predict physical phenomena.
2. Further simplifying, I assume that the set of models to describe reality is finite, so that at some stage it is possible to completely describe reality, i.e. to “solve” science, at least in the limit.
3. I then claim that any science-faring civilization will ultimately reach “science-completeness”, the state described in the previous point. This is assuming
   1. Eventual progress in the long run (i.e. no great-filter-like events, recovery from dark ages, etc.).
   2. Sufficient if not infinite time for doing so – we are working in terms of limits.
4. If this is true, then this means that any two science-complete civilizations will converge to the same set of models (perhaps expressed differently, but ultimately equivalent). In the absence of multiple civilizations, the point can be expressed as: In terms of science, the end state is always identical for any science-faring civilization that fits the assumptions above.
5. Scientific knowledge is thus necessarily universal, non-rival, and non-excludable. The same fact “belongs” to reality, not to its first discoverer. There is a human story for how Maxwell’s equations were established, but the physics they describe is not exclusive to humans, it is the same for everyone. Who discovered it first is arbitrary, the universe does not care about copyright and ownership.
6. What remains distinctive for a species, then, is everything not fixed by those universal models—the stories, aesthetics, value-hierarchies, rituals unique to a civilization. Call that remainder culture = civilisation mod science. In the limit, it is the only domain where contributions are truly non-redundant and therefore the deepest expression of what it means to be this civilisation—indeed, to be human.

We can’t afford to exclusively culture-max yet

If I value meaning and I ascribe meaning to identity, and my identity is defined by my cultural outputs, then I should just culture-max my life right? In fact, we should all just be making art and going to museums and writing novels and cooking food in a never ending fantastic celebration of humanity, right? And this is a call to abandon science, an anti-STEM manifesto undermining the value of scientific endeavors, right?

THIS IS NOT WHAT THIS ESSAY IS SAYING!

As great as the first part of that sounds, there is a reason I have specifically framed the thesis as “in the limit” – we are simply not there yet. Curiosity aside, there is a very pragmatic reason why we do science today: we are in a situation of “technical debt” with respect to our understanding of reality. There are essentially many many holes in our physical models such that we still are not able to address the many problems that blight our existence today. Health, energy, climate, food security, population, scarcity – these are all problems waiting for technical solutions bottlenecked by knowledge we do not yet have.

Until we have bridged that gap, we cannot afford to exclusively culture-max – we would not survive doing so. Note briefly that this does not mean that the opposite is true either – if we were to exclusively hill-climb science we would be left with no culture to identify ourselves by¹. Admittedly that reads like a cop-out, and it is. I am not aiming to prescribe some call to action here, my goal is to share some of my thoughts and observations.

What comes after science completeness

The idea behind this essay came to me while listening to music and trying to rationalize why I valued that experience. It was in a period of my life where I was also trying to understand why identity felt so important, so you can see how the thesis emerged. This rationalization is not out of character, it’s something I tend to do, or so I am told. As for this essay, it’s underdeveloped, makes strong generalizations and assumptions, but I think it’s probably still valuable to lean towards putting it out there anyway. For instance, here are some implications that came to mind while developing this idea and writing this essay which I found helpful, and which perhaps you may too.

First, I think taking this view provides at least a partial answer to the questions of “What will we do when our labour will finally be automated away? How will we find meaning after work?” I always found those questions kind of odd, because there are so many ways to get meaning outside of work, and so it feels like those questions come from a lack of introspection or a lack of imagination. Do you not find meaning in your relationships? From the stories you’re told and the stories you tell? Have you never felt something when experiencing a piece art? Have you ever tried making some yourself? My answer to the meaning post-labour questions is that I expect that we will largely switch to mainly cultural activities, to culture-maxxing, and maybe meaning will emerge in ensuring the valence and quality of our cultural outputs is high, whatever that will mean. This may come across as hedonistic, but I challenge the Calvinistic devil sitting on your shoulder to consider that you can enjoy things and they can still not be devoid of value, and that meaning does not need to come from sacrifice.

An interesting consequence of this is to consider cities after science-completeness. Today, we flock to urban centers mostly dictated by career ambition, opportunities and economic necessity. At some stage you may imagine that, freed from such constraints, we’ll be drawn by something else entirely: the vibe, the scenes, the particular cultural textures that makes Granada feel like Rome, the intricacies of ordering drinks at your neighborhood bar that make it special for you despite serving the same beer as everywhere else, the subconscious memories make a language feel like an inseparable part of yourself rather than just a tool for communication.

A possible corollary of this is that we may shift our measures of wealth away from economic indicators such as GDP and towards measures of cultural output, both in terms of quantity and quality². A nation that produces more and better cultural artifacts could be interpreted as being able to afford to do so, i.e. have less of the technical debt mentioned earlier, and thereby be wealthier.

Conclusion

Zooming back in and returning to present-day, on a personal level I found this framing to help further motivate what I dedicate my career to. Yes, getting to work on machine learning in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence already comes with a ton of motivation – I get to work on the ‘grand challenge’ of our times, the curiosity itch is more than scratched (these are interesting problems!), and it’s also really cool in a sci-fi kinda way, which I like. But beyond that, the framing gives me further answers to the questions of “ok but why bother with this grand challenge in particular?” – 1. Because it is likely one of the highest leverage approaches to bridging that technical debt 2. Because beyond that gap we get to enjoy a culture-maxxing world, a world which I think will be more meaningful. Outside of work, the framing has guided me also in what sort of hobbies I pursue, and what I do with my free time. Besides the deeper meaning I get from the rationalization, in a science-complete world it will be valuable to be able to contribute to culture, so may as well start now.

So, what does all this mean for what we should actually do about culture today? If we accept the thesis that, in the limit, culture is the only non-redundant contribution left, then it becomes urgent to resist the flattening forces of enshittification and monoculture. The world does not need a single, blandly universal set of stories, aesthetics, or rituals. It needs difference, specificity, and texture. This is not an argument for static preservation or nostalgia, but for active participation: engage in culture, create it, curate it, protect it. Recognize that not all cultural output is automatically good or meaningful—beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but only up to a point; there are real questions of quality, depth, and significance that are worth interrogating. Perhaps, in a science-complete world, the study and cultivation of culture—understanding what makes it rich, vibrant, or beautiful—will itself become a new kind of science, or at least the most important human endeavor left. For now I raise this essay as food for thought, and perhaps to inspire some steps in that direction.

Appendix

Engineering

What about engineering? It’s a bit murky. The temptation is to file engineering under the domain of science, as we normally do, e.g. with STEM. But I’m not sure it fits our working definition. Engineering is not about describing reality, it is not about finding models that explain and predict physical phenomena. Engineering, I claim, is the process of how we use our understanding of reality to solve problems. These solutions are imbued with decisions, preferences, taste, design – there are optimal engineering solutions but these are optimal w.r.t. some objective function dictated by the preferences which give rise to the problem in the first place. There is something cultural here, engineering is artisanal, perhaps. And so because of that, I am tempted to file it under the “remainder” of science completeness. I can imagine a science-complete world where ever-evolving cultures and changing preferences demand new engineering approaches, which therefore fail to converge to the same universal set like science does. I am still unsure about this, but perhaps there’s something there.

Uniqueness for Meaning

Why does meaning necessarily need to be derived from uniqueness/irreducibility? I am not sure, and perhaps I am wrong. One of the thought experiments that helped me develop this idea was to consider a world where we made contact with a (friendly) alien species. Assuming science-completeness on both sides, what would I be interested to learn about them? Probably their language, their religion (if any), their food, their history, etc.. These are all cultural elements. Why would I be interested in these aspects specifically? From there I reasoned that I expect these to be unique to them, and correspondingly our (human) own cultural elements would be unique to us, and would be a means of pride and identity, to which I then ascribed meaning.

Is this just the Singularity?

Kind of? I feel like science-completeness is the end state of the singularity, which in my mind is the moment a civilization (or the universe) kicks off an intelligence explosion via recursive/rapid self-improving intelligent systems, which would ultimately culminate in “solving” science.

Flora and Fauna

Where do flora and fauna fit in all this? The plants, animals, and landscapes associated with a culture are often deeply intertwined with its identity – I’d be easily convinced for instance that horses are an integral part of Mongolian identity (though perhaps I am wrong about this out of ignorance). These aren’t cultural outputs, yet they often directly shape it – think cuisine, mythology and even language. If the “culture” bucket feels forced here, perhaps that’s an indication that “culture” is the wrong term to ascribe to this remainder that I speak of.