On the heels of any number of threads in the past few months, I spent some of
yesterday reflecting on what seems like another distillation.
EricS -
As usual, this is a very dense but eloquent summarization of (yet)
another aspect of our common di(multi)lemma as we participate
in/experience a collective phase change. This dovetails with our
arguments here about individual vs collective (via mis-application of
metonym/metaphor?).
/Collective Phase Change and Logistic-Function Lurches/: I contend
(speculate) that a phase change in "humanity" began order 5k or 10k or
50k years ago and proceeded on it's exponential change on multiple
(pareto-esque) frontiers. We go through logistic-function "lurches" in
hard-material technology, language, soft technology (politics, culture),
over and over-again with each one representing an enhanced
"consolidation" and "reach" of human-human engagement.
/Historical Revolutions/: The early industrial-/transportation/
revolution yielding locomotives and steamships, the /communication/
revolution still unfolding but accellerating with wireless comms, the
/information/computing/ foreshadowed by the abacus and the difference
engine and ignited by WWII code-breaking and Feynman-Calculator rooms
for physics, and now introducing *formal* /self-organization/ to
information processing (really igniting the last decade+).
/Individual vs Collective Aspirations/: Levin's /Scale Free Cognition/
conceit/concept is a powerful framing (IMO) as to what is afoot
(underfoot in fact) today with the aspirations of the individual human
colliding with that of various collectives of many stripes, sometimes
nucleated around a "great man" (guru/cult-figure/etc) or emergent across
a substrate (nationalism, religio-fervorism, capito-socio-communo-ism,
post-humanism, ...). Classical Fuedalism formalized this to some
degree, with a /holarchical/heterarchica/l alleigance to the
local/not-local lord, baron, duke, king whilst also local
priest/bishop.cardinal, pope, and also to language and cultural style
identity/cohesion.
/Accelleration of Scale/Temporal Compression/: This churn which once had
a characteristic time/space scale of decades (life-phase) and region
(scandinavia, northern/southern/western Med, E. EU, etc) is now scaled
closer to the */attention span of a single human/* (hours, months) and
geopolitically (nearly?) global?
It is really hellish on many of us who are still coupled at the
traditional scales... to the habits and preferences of our grandparents
and to the village or automobile-accessible region we came of age in.
Metaphorize it as "/tidal forces/" seeming to tear us apart
(internally/externally)?
/Language and Distortion of the Intersubjective/: Language, as you
point out, has become the dominant medium of exchange and it's current
/distortion/ and /slipperiness/ is both disturbing and a "natural
consequence" of this rapid sqew in our fundament? And LLM's aren't
"helping" or more to the point, they ARE helping to speed up this sqew
(to our chagrin). While this may all map (recursively) down to the
flow of energy through dissipative structures (physics unto biological)
it is happening in the milieu of language (nod to AT's aspirations to
model language structures).
/Singularity Rhetoric/: While the Broderickian/Vingeian/Kurzweillian
Singularity suggests/models with an (hyper)exponential (for emotional
effect), they do not actually achieve the vertical asymptote they
claim/imply.
/Multiscale Selfishness/: But this is (yet another) tangent methinks:
the tangent-of-the-moment in my mind refers to the /individual/group
selection question /we(y'all)'ve been maundering on here. Is Cancer a
/selfish cell/, a /selfish gene/, or /collectivized selfishness/ at the
tissue/organ level? Whether precisely evolutionarily selected I think
the answer is "yes" (all and more) and we are seeing the same thing
afoot as the cancers that are MAGA or (perhaps?) "wokeism" (en-extrema)
selfishing against the "Western Civilization" and "Xtianity" and
(hyper)"Capitalism" as well as Libertarianism's "soveriegn selfism" and
the MAGA-esque "hyper-individualism" version?
I must quit now before I tangent again. /E Pluribus Unum/ (or not?)
- SteveS
In the early decades, the U.S. had a motto; never official, but one of the
better reflections of the country: e pluribus unum.
It was good in two ways that can be itemized:
— It reflected a country situating itself in a larger context (of history, of
humanity, of governance)
— It presumed as the starting point a populace capable of following such
concepts and the existence of languages from other places and times
At some point (which I once looked up), the one good motto got replaced
(officially?) with the recent-past motto: in god we trust. A motto that is by
every measure worse, though one could say it has the virtue of still being
English, and a little composed.
But the motto has been, I think, replaced again. Now it would be
lolnothingmatters.
I have been thinking about other compressions, too, over some extended time,
some of it driven by trying to read a little from historians, and wondering
which features of the present are canonical and which are idiosyncratic to this
place and time. If I had to list the two problems (this is, to some degree, to
Nick’s concern about why the rationalist-public aspiration didn’t work out so
well, though there are many dimensions in which to answer that) that we must
deal with, I would say we need to correct these two widespread now-premises:
— that cruelty is entertainment (that one is canonical, and I raised it long
ago in my characterization of fascism as using performances of cruelty to
promise an identity to the masses, to keep them organized in the mob); and
— that entertainment is a substitute for living (or that one cannot be really
distinguished from the other, so why do we bother with two words?)
The nihilist motto above is somehow closely tied to the second problem, and
that one I think is somewhat idiosyncratic. The modern industrial era is so
_big_ and so complex in its institutional and social order, that the connection
of a person’s moment-to-moment choices and acts, to their full suite of
consequences is cryptic-to-impenetrable most of the time. Then there is the
dimension-lowering of communication in the remote and electronic-network age.
And Glen’s very nice materials on AI now as the offboarding of attention.
These three, together with saturation-level submersion in “entertainment” as a
whole field of social order, enable a level of disconnection and
irresponsibility from _everything_ that probably was not available to any era
of humanity before. People still have moral responsibility for having lost the
ability to distinguish between entertainment and living, but I think I would
stop short of “blaming” them for it, as the whole system structure is like a
whirlpool that it is hard for most people to escape being sucked down into.
It is hard for me to see using “arguments” or other fairly fragile and
low-dimensional tools to deal with problems until we have found ways to address
these previous two big context-aspects.
Eric
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